Attending That Conference

That Conference

When I started working on my first course for Pluralsight, I happened to come across a few mentions of ThatConference. After some research and seeing the line-up, I’m happy to say I’ll be attending this year’s conference with my family. A few details:

The conference is billed as family friendly, which shines through in the sessions and events. The waterpark is enough for my daughter, but I also hope to get her engaged in programming and have her see more of what I do on a day-to-day basis.

The conference is located in the Wisconsin Dells, which is affectionately referred to as the Disney of the Upper Midwest.

The tech sessions primarily focus on web, mobile and cloud. As you may expect, the web-related sessions are JavaScript dominated. I’ll probably try to get to a good smattering of sessions across the categories.

Sessions that Stuck Out

I’ve listed the sessions that stuck out to be me below; though, I always seem to completely switch my schedule around after arriving.

I always enjoy hearing others’ perspectives on paying down technical debt. Why? Because no matter how hard we try, even the best developers cut corners somewhere. Most of us are either in a start-up like environment and having to deliver features quickly or we are in an established environment and dealing with legacy. On top of all of this, the speaker is a coffee roaster and a big fan of naps, two things which I love! Jim Holmes can be found here: http://FrazzledDad.com

AngularJS – Top 10 Tips

I’m more and more obsessed with JavaScript these days. You have to understand, I was around in the late ’90s, so JavaScript used to be the bane of my existence. The proliferation of JavaScript frameworks is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing in that there are multiple ways to provide better experiences to our users and a curse in that there are multiple ways to build that experience. The innovative developer in me is excited while the architect in me cringes. I digress… having John Lindquist from JetBrains should be a great talk. He will be presenting the a top 10 tips around AngularJS, which has quickly become one of the top JS frameworks in the market. John Lindquist can be found here: https://twitter.com/@johnlindquist

Slow Roasted AngularJS Best Practices

Again, obsessed with AngularJS. Joe Eames is a collaborator on the top course for Pluralsight.com, which should mean a great presentation. He can be found here: https://twitter.com/josepheames

Game Night

Yep.

Going Node at Netflix

The session is going to cover a case study of moving from Java and Struts (shiver up the spine) to a Node based solution. It will be given by Ryan Anklam, who can be found here: http://blog.ankl.am/

Leon’s Allegory of the Cave

A session around the role of the software developer in the modern world. It will be presented by Leon Gersing, who is a developer for GitHub. You can find him here: http://leongersing.com/

People, Process, Tools – The Essence of DevOps

This session is essentially how to be more collaborative across development and operations, which is always something of interest to me as far as others’ experiences. The presentation will be given by Richard Campbell who can be found here: http://www.dotnetrocks.com/

Real World Single Page Apps: A Knockout Case Study

Knockout is another great JavaScript framework on the market and this presentation will be given by Cory House who can be found here: http://www.bitnative.com/

Responsive Web Development Patterns

As the title implies, a range of topics around responsive web development will be covered, which is important to me right now. The presentation is given by Brad Broulik who can be found here: http://bradbroulik.blogspot.com

That Pig Roast

Are You Attending?

If you are attending, please let me know if there are any presentations I missed that seem interesting. Happy coding!

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